When the National Audubon Society set out to create a new environmentally sound headquarters building, it took a very different approach. It began with a site in the heart of downtown Manhattan, a place as deliberately inaccessible to automobile commuters as the peak of Mount McKinley, although easily reached by subway or bus. On a once fashionable corner a century ago the architect George Browne Post designed a handsome eight-story department store faced in brownstone and brick. As the neighborhood changed, the building fell on hard times, housed a sweatshop for a while and was vacant when Audubon bought it in 1989. From the start, the project embodied the environmentalist creed: it recycled an entire building.
The renovation, by Croxton Collaborative Architects, is functional and sober, but Audubon House is one of the most pleasant places to work in the city. Croxton had three concrete goals: saving energy, reducing pollution (including solid waste), and promoting healthful working conditions. The design takes advantage of the south-and west-facing floor-to-ceiling windows to light the offices with the natural light of Manhattan, a much-denigrated but perfectly usable resource. Overhead lights are connected to sensors-which dim or brighten them as needed-and motion detectors, which shut them off automatically if the occupant leaves the office, or falls asleep at his desk. In contrast to the fluorescent illumination that floods most American offices, ambient light levels are kept low, while “task” lamps focus light on desks. Some older buildings consume four watts per square foot of office space in lighting; Audubon claims it will light its offices with less than three quarters of a watt.
That in turn implies another big savings, in cooling costs; every watt that a light burns inside a building is an increment of heat that will be spewed into the atmosphere by the air-conditioning system. Audubon House is both heated and cooled with the very ecologically fashionable fuel, natural gas, which by Audubon’s calculations will emit less pollution than generating an equivalent amount of electricity from coal or oil-burning power plants. The double-glazed windows reflect heat out in the summer, keep it inside in winter-and open and close, for natural cooling during the several hours each year that New York’s climate approaches temperateness. Interestingly, though, “active” solar heating, very much in vogue a decade ago, was not considered cost efficient. Audubon’s goal, according to president Peter A. A. Berle, was to use off-the-shelf technologies whose cost could be recouped in savings in three to five years.
No detail of environmental correctness has been left out of the building; you get the feeling that to light a cigarette in its airy precincts would be a desecration on par with picking your nose in a cathedral. The architects used mostly natural products in the interior, including a subfloor of Homasote, made from recycled newsprint. Four chutes run the whole height of the building, leading to recycling bins in the cellar, including one for food waste; workers’ leftover sandwiches will be composted into a mixture that will be used in the building’s rooftop garden. So what if no trees can be seen out its windows? Audubon House will grow its own.
